Journalists have rarely meddled with the rarified echelons of scholarship from the perusal of archival material. Even fewer have sought to fuse them with current events. Theirs have generally been accounts that are up-close to events and their makers. Sukumar Muralidharan melds both genres to weave a closely knitted book with the media as its axle, as he chronicles the gradual moral entrapment of Indian civic and political life in the bright arcs of foreign money, a sense of status quoism and the call of the market.